Field
Related Art
Social networks may include nodes representing individuals and/or organizations, along with links between pairs of nodes that represent different types and/or levels of social familiarity between the nodes. For example, two nodes in a social network may be connected as friends, acquaintances, family members, and/or professional contacts. Social networks may further be tracked and/or maintained on web-based social networking services, such as online professional networks that allow the individuals and/or organizations to establish and maintain professional connections, list work and community experience, endorse and/or recommend one another, run advertising and marketing campaigns, promote products and/or services, and/or search and apply for jobs.
In turn, social networks and/or online professional networks may facilitate business activities such as sales, marketing, and/or recruiting by the individuals and/or organizations. For example, sales professionals may use an online professional network to locate prospects, maintain a professional image, establish and maintain relationships, and/or engage with other individuals and organizations. To fully leverage the online professional network in conducting business activities, the individuals and/or organizations may perform complex queries of the online professional network. For example, a sales professional may identify sales prospects by searching the online professional network for a chain of individuals and/or organizations that can be used to connect the sales professional to the sales prospects.
However, complex querying of social and/or online professional network data may be time- and/or resource-intensive. For example, a query that finds possible paths between two nodes in the online professional network may require a scan of all links between individuals and/or organizations that may be used to form a path connecting the nodes, with the number of links to be scanned increasing exponentially with the number of hops in the path. Moreover, a subset of the individuals and/or organizations may have a significantly larger than average number of links to other individuals and/or organizations, resulting in the added consumption of computational resources and/or time during execution of the query if the individuals and/or organizations are included in the search space of the query.
Consequently, querying of social and/or online professional networks may be facilitated by mechanisms for improving the performance of complex queries of social and/or online professional network data.
In the figures, like reference numerals refer to the same figure elements.